Love does not respond to Demands
Love is an offering that can only come out of a free expression of the heart. Try to force love and what you will get as a result is something else, but not love. This is why love and freedom are two sides of the same coin — the divine coin. Love is a gift that can only be given spontaneously, from a place of freedom.
We can never receive real love as a response to any demand. A connection we have might be kept longer as a result of demand, and while this connection might dress up as an expression of love, it is not really love. It can be an expression of pity and guilt, but pity and guilt are not equal to love. They are love’s substitutes.
It had dawned upon me lately how we, humans, sometimes use guilt as a replacement for love, and how religions do it so well that they created a whole mechanism of guilt, that holds the whole religion together. Jesus spoke of love, but the church built itself based upon guilt.
Love is wild in its nature, but the wild nature of love can sometimes be frustrating to our ordinary personalities because being really wild recognizes no commitments that are made by our minds. Love is wild and thus does not understand the language of law and rules. As my son, Yehoo-Shalem wrote in his song “there are no rules in love, no form to the flame, nothing is as sweet as a kiss”.
Many times we want love to stay around, but it is wild, and it moves in an unpredictable way, like the weather that humans would have liked to predict instead it has its own will.
Love is undomesticated, thus the domesticated part in us is getting frustrated with its wild and unpredictable nature, and instead tries to tie it with ropes of law, tradition, rules, and expectations. Yet love is a magic liquid, it can never be tied up. Never.
So, we created guilt to replace love as the motivation for connection. Unlike love, guilt is trustworthy! You can trust guilt to not go anywhere. What is true is actually the opposite, the more “shoulds” are introduced into the interpersonal field, the more guilt will entangle everybody who’s involved.
Although beware, rarely guilt runs its mission using its own name. Usually, it will work undercover, and as a secret agent, will use a pseudo name and introduce itself as love.
In Hebrew the word for guilt is ASHAM — אשמ
If we rotate the order of the letters, as we often do in Kabbala to look for hidden aspects of a term, we would find the אשמ can transform to:
אמש — yesterday
שמא — perhaps
משא — burden
Guilt is always connected to the past (“yesterday”), it doesn’t live in the present moment but links the present moment to the burden of the past, making the mind and the emotions question- perhaps I did something wrong, perhaps things could have been better if I was acting in a different way…?
But the truth is that guilt has a deep connection to the ego. It basically takes credit for our deeds. Pride is a result of taking credit for our “good” deeds and guilt is a result of taking personal credit for our “bad” deeds. While the truth is that we do not know. We do not know for sure if something is good or bad, in the ultimate sense of things, and we for sure do not know if things could indeed happen in any different way than they did. Our ego likes to think this way. But that is all.
Living free of guilt is a path I took for myself this last full moon — which was Passover. In Passover, we are called to clean ourselves from residues of old files, that are egoic oriented and not fresh, alive, or vibrant. For me, those residues are the dust of guilt that I still find in my system.
And to be clear: taking responsibility is VERY DIFFERENT from feeling guilty. When I see that I did something and I feel good about it, I can learn from it and take responsibility to do it better next time. No guilt is involved in it. I feel light and excited to try again and do it better as if I’m in a game. Guilt makes me heavy emotionally and leaves me feeling like a piece of shit. Heavy and defeated. After all this who can get the energy and the excitement to try to do it better next time?
I’m inviting you to this journey as well. Cleaning ourselves from guilt by looking deeply to find where in our relationships (with others and with life) I am acting out of guilt, and do I fool myself by calling it “love”?
Ohad Pele / April 2022
